In the end there I couldn't find a decent JCW in my area. They were either stripped and converted to racecars or in generally bad condition. I wanted neither. Then this R53 Cooper S popped up local to me and I checked it out and in the end bought it.

It has the chrono package that gets me oiltemp and oil pressure gauges, hid headlights, the somewhat rare factory limited slip diff and the sporty leather seats. Has a pretty good service history with a recent timing chain renewal, the previous owner being a BMW mechanic.

Overall it's not in bad shape for a 13 year old car. Clear coat is peeling in a couple spots on the hatch and like almost all of the R53 there is some oil consumption, but nothing concerning. It's cheap to insure and I can deal with the 9.5l/100km SuperPlus as I don't really drive it all that much (only 5k kms since August).

I wanted something different after the mustang and this certainly is. Oh and that SWEEEEEEEEEEEEEET induction noise. I could drive the car just to listen to it

Well D-Fence had quick spin in mine around Christmas, I think he was hooked afterwards.

In general they are surprisingly cheap. Now these cars have their issues, but a first gen (read: supercharged) Cooper S can be had around 5k EUR. To me that's good value, especially as they likely won't depreciate much further.
A JCW will probalby be an even better investment around 8-10k EUR, but they are hard to come by. And the difference in price pays for a pulley, injectors & a tune with money left over

Active Member

Did a full service on the car over the easter weekend. Cleaned and serviced the air filter (there´s a pipercross panel filter from the previous owner), new oil (per mini experts RW Edition I put Motul 8100 5w40 in it, which should help oil consumption) , oil filter + new spark plugs.

Spark plugs were probably never changed before and it shows:
I´ve upgraded them to the JCW spec one step colder NGK, which might be a first indicator of things to come

As mentioned before I´ve also started the process to retrofit cruise control and steering wheel controls for the radio:

Removed the wheel to change the clockspring

Retrofitted buttons to the wheel (I bought an entire wheel without airbag, but mine was nicer)

All done

Still have to run the wiring and have the car coded to make it work, but at least the pile of parts to go on the car is getting smaller

Mrs. IceBone

Apparently the change interval is every second oilchange (30k miles) for JCW and every 60k miles for cooper S.....so someone has been slacking if these were the original ones. I just checked my service book, Inspection 2 with Spark Plugs was done in December according to it....so let us hope they did it and used the JCW ones.

Active Member

Apparently the change interval is every second oilchange (30k miles) for JCW and every 60k miles for cooper S.....so someone has been slacking if these were the original ones. I just checked my service book, Inspection 2 with Spark Plugs was done in December according to it....so let us hope they did it and used the JCW ones.

To be fair it might be the second set then. That would make them only slightly overdue at currently 133k.

Anyways I am not very motivated to run a wiring harness, because I bought new power tools. Therefore I moved another job I wanted to get done up the queue: replacing the notorious crank positioning sensor oring. It's doable in the front end service mode, which means taking off the bumper and moving the radiator package forward to gain access to the front of the engine. While I was at it I also replaced the fog lights for Osram Nighbreaker Laser, I already did all the rest (including the HIDs) a while ago. But the fog lights are so low in the bumper it requires the inner wheel wells to be removed to gain access. That was happening today anyways.

The afromentioned new powertool, 400Nm of nut busting torque ( it really says so in the description )

Bumper off

Crashbars off

Sliding the radiator pack forward on 2 8mm bolts

Shitty old CPS with busted oring

Same CPS as before but cleaned and with new oring

everything mostly back together

Of course not all of the crappy plastic clips holding the inner fender liner together survived, so I ordered 10 new ones and a couple of the rusty underbody fasteners and will rely on zip ties until they get here. No big deal though.

Hopefully this will reduce if not stop the oil leakage coming from the engine. Time will tell!

Well it took quite a bit longer than expected, but I've just completed the project. As D-Fence can attest to, it was also a bit more nerve wracking than I thought it was going to be.

So last thing I did was fit the clock spring and new wheel. That by itself does nothing. Not even the buttons light up. There is a lot of talk on the forums that the radio controls work right away, that is not the case.
So it was time to run the retrofit wiring harness. That is a pretty involved procedure. Connectors go to: ground, fuse box, clock spring, instrument cluster, clutch switch, body control module and ECU.

Taking it from left to right I started with fuse box, clockspring and instrument cluster. On another day I did the passenger side with ground, obd2 and body control module. Those were all pretty straight forward.

On the third day I tackled the install on the ECU connector. Now that was a fun one... Because the 40pin connector does not have through holes for pins not used on the particular car, you have to either drill it out, or change the connector entirely with one supplied with the retrofit wiring harness. Drilling was never going to be a clean method, so after some consideration (read cursing) I decided to move all 40 pins to the new connector to then add the 2 I didn't have previously.
Start:

OMFG WHAT DID I DO????:

All done (or so I thought):

I was VERY relieved that the car fired up with no codes after that brain surgery...

Next I connected the clutch switch (the cruise control uses both brake and clutch switch as a safety), I had a friend code the cruise control into the body control module and ECU.

Connecting up the harness already made the radio controls functional and after coding the cruise control light in the dash lights up when activated. Unfortunately cruise did not work though. Checking the car with INPA it claimed the clutch switch to be active all the time, prohibiting the cruise control to stay active. Also had a fault for clutch switch signal out of range. Now that should have been a warning. Stupid me thought the clutch switch I bought (cheapo knockoff, cause simple part) was faulty. Tried 2 different ones with the same result.

Then I figured out, that the wiring harness and it's clutch switch connector was set up for pre facelift cars, and with mine being a facelift was applying 12V to the sensor input in the ECU, whilst frying the switch in the process... Not good...

I changed the pinout to the correct one, but still no dice. After getting a bit frustrated with the whole thing I let it sit for while. Tonight I gave it another go and with D-Fence verifying his pinout and wire color coding we were able to narrow it down to the dreaded 40 pin ECU connector.

As it turns out the additional clutch input wire didn't seat it's pin properly shorting on the connector next to it, therefore disabling the clutch switch. Clutch switch is still bad, but now I can ground the signal manually and it reads as a state change on the clutch sensor. Quick test spin confirms: cruise control works!

The retrofit was reasonably cheap, but a lot more stressful than anticipated. Very happy with the result though!

Active Member

I changed the clutch switch to a pre facelift model, and that worked right out of the box. It seems the clutch master cylinder did not have the correct provision to trigger the clip in hall effect sensor of the facelift clutch switch.
Since I had to order parts anyways I splurged on a new pcv valve and threw that it, since I always had some oil mist around the oil filler cap. That has now disappeared. Oil consumption down to virtually zero. So great success!

Coming up on one year of ownership, I think I'll keep it for another year or so.